Alec Baldwin has reprised in his role as Donald Trump for the latest episode of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, identifying the US president as the true martyr of the tragic Charlottesville rally.

A 12-year-old singing ventriloquist has been awarded US$1 (A$1.3) million prize and her own Las Vegas show after taking the America's Got Talent crown on the season 12 finale of the NBC reality competition.

The truth is the CIA, NSA and state-sponsored hackers from other like-minded nations have been able to attack and penetrate these everyday digital items for some time.

It is the laying out in plain sight and great detail of the majority of the spy agency's hacking arsenal and toolkit that is disturbing. It is the rattling of our assumed right to privacy that has us shaken.

Yet, under our noses, ongoing cyber warfare is being carried out by the US, Russia, China, North Korea, UK, Israel, Iran and to a lesser extent ISIS.

There are no bombs dropped or body bags coming home. But malicious computer worms, mass surveillance, fake news and destabilisation of economies and political systems is the battleground of today.

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Traditional superpowers and other smaller ambitious players are recruiting their smartest minds and pouring vast resources into an unseen war of cyber offence and defence.

Then US President George W Bush speaks to reporters with then CIA Director Porter Goss at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency 03 March, 2005 in Langley, Virginia.

Against this murky backdrop, anti-privacy group Wikileaks promises 'Vault 7' is its biggest ever leaks of CIA documents.

Although the 8,761 documents are yet to verified as authentic, Wikileaks has a solid reputation for exposing very real, highly-classified documents.

The most explosive contents in the trove of documents are:

-- CIA malware can take over a person's Apple or Android phone; monitoring text messages and audio, while using the phone's camera and microphone to record

-- A tool called "Weeping Angel" attacks Samsung SmartTVs; you believe your TV is off but it is covertly recording everything happening in the room

-- Car hacking: The CIA has explored the possibility of infecting internet-connected systems of modern vehicles, potentially to carry out assassinations

-- Encrypted apps not secure: CIA can bypass so-called encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram

-- Attributing CIA hacks to other states: Wikileaks claims an entire department is dedicated to "misdirect attribution" and plant digital fingerprints that point to other groups, such as hackers in Russia, China or North Korea

Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 17, 2015.

Wikileaks editor Julian Assange did not disclose from who or where the 'Vault 7' leak came.

Since the 2016 US elections, when the Hillary Clinton camp seemed almost exclusively targeted by damaging dumps from Wikileaks, the allegiance of Assange's organisation has come under increasing political scrutiny.

There are rumblings in Washington that 'Vault 7' represents just the latest act in cyber warfare and destabilisation tactics between the US and Russia.

Assange, in a statement accompanying today's leak, directly commented on cyber warfare representing a new kind of arms race.

"There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber 'weapons'," he cautioned, amid one the biggest leaks of classified information in recent years.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visiting the Natanz uranium enrichment facilities some 300 kms south of the capital Tehran.

If indeed the 'Vault 7' leak was the work of Russian hackers, the ability to penetrate a US government network is nothing new for Kremlin-backed operatives.

One of Russia's most audacious acts of cyber espionage happened in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2008.

Ironically, it was a masterful low-fi tactic that allowed Russian spies to breach a classified US government network that wasn't even connected to the internet.

The act of cunning was detailed in a book called Dark Territory: a history of cyberwar and later The New Yorker.

Russian spies put infected USB sticks in shops located around NATO's headquarters in Kabul on the cunning assumption that eventually an unsuspecting American would buy one and insert it into their work computer.

Around a year later, a malicious computer worm that took out a once-secret Iranian nuclear complex showcased the devastating capability of cyber warfare.

Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange prepare a placard with posters showing Assange's portrait with a US flag over his mouth outside the Ecuadorian embassy in central London on June 21, 2012. Source: AFP

Stuxnet, as the attack came to be known, was linked to US and Israel, though no players - state-sponsored or otherwise - have ever claimed responsibility.